Biologibloggen

I started working as a post doc in March together with Jörgen Ripa and Jacob Johansson in ThePEG, at the Evolutionary Ecology unit. Last year I defended my thesis in computational mathematics at Umeå University in northern Sweden. My research is about understanding bumblebee coexistence and response to environmental change. To do this I use optimization and techniques from adaptive dynamics. Our basic assumption is that bumblebees compete for many flower resources which have different peaks during a season. The question is if and how the bumblebees will specialize in a flower resource, and how the resources will coevolve with the bumblebees.

mars 20, 2017

Inger Ekström

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I am returning to Sweden after nearly two decades abroad. I completed my undergraduate education at UC Berkeley in California, my Masters and PhD at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, and then did two post-docs in Brazil – one at the University of São Paulo and another at São Paulo Federal University in Diadema. Since my undergraduate years, my focal study system has been avian malaria. I’ve been involved in research on these organisms’ community ecology, biogeography, and host specificity, among other things.

With my current position, I am switching gears to work with experimental evolution. I will work with Charlie Cornwallis, Karin Rengefors, Erik Svensson, and Tobias Uller, but for the first couple of years I will be focusing on the Chlamydomonas multicellularity project lead by Charlie and Karin. Markus Lindh, a new postdoc here, has already provided an excellent summary of the project aims on Biologibloggen if you’re interested in knowing more about it.

mars 20, 2017

Inger Ekström

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Hi everybody!

My name is Jan Olsson and I’ve just started working at the Department of Biology as a research journalist. For many years I worked as a reporter and news editor at different media companies. For the last year I have been a press officer at the Faculty of Science at Lund University. My role at the Department of Biology involves working with text presentations and news for the department’s website.

Catch people’s interest

One of my first tasks is to write web presentations in Swedish for each research group at the department. The goal is to make sure that the public and your colleagues get relevant information presented in an interesting way on each group’s web page. Later, I will also work with individual researchers’ web pages. In other words, I will, in close cooperation with you, write presentations similar to popular summaries.

Make your research known

As well as working with presentations for the web, I’ll also keep my eyes open for news mainly based on your findings and research. The news will be published on the department’s website. In order to do this I will need your help. A lot depends on you as to whether or not your findings will reach out to a wider public. Very often I will not know anything about your research if you do not tell me. So please get in touch!

februari 9, 2017

Inger Ekström

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My name is Xiaoqing Hou and I’m a new PhD student in the Pheromone Group since November last year, supported by a scholarship form CSC.

I’m from a small city in the north of China. I received my bachelor’s degree and master’s degree from Nanjing Agricultural University. My master major is Agricultural Entomology and Pest Control, and I focused on exploring the effects of biochar amendment to soil on feeding behavior and life history of Nilaparvata lugens.

The genes encoding olfactory receptors (ORs) are identified in many insects. Some ORs are highly specific and bind only a few odorants, while others are promiscuous, but we are far from understanding where in these receptors selectivity and sensitivity are encoded. In my PhD project I will study the functional significance of sequence variation in insect olfactory receptors (ORs).

januari 27, 2017

Inger Ekström

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I did my PhD study at the Linnaeus University, Sweden and postdoc at University of Hawaii on microbial ecology and oceanography characterizing distribution patterns and responses to predicted climate change among marine bacterial assemblages. In much of my recent work I applied theoretical ecological frameworks such as metapopulation and metacommunity models to understand biogeography of marine microbes.

Currently I am working with Charlie Cornwallis and Karin Rengefors among others, in a collaborative interdisciplinary project on the genetic mechanisms involved in the evolution of multicellularity in microbes. The goal of this evolutionary ecology project is to determine what genetic factors allow particular unicellular organisms to take the evolutionary leap toward a multicellular life style, in particular in the model organism
Chlamydomonas sp. but also among other unicellular organisms carrying the capacity to become multicellular.

januari 9, 2017

Inger Ekström

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Hello all! My name is Johanna Yourstone and I am very excited to start my PhD position at the Biodiversity unit, with main supervisor Ola Olsson and co-supervisor Henrik Smith.

I have been studying biology at Lund University the last couple of years (with some breaks for adventures and art studies) and I did my bachelor thesis on the impact of a neonicotinoid on solitary bees. Since then I have been very fascinated by bees and pollination ecology, which together with birding, botany and other nerdy interests brings me out in nature whenever chance is.

In my project I will look at the effect of spatio-temporal flower resource variation (related to agriculture intensity and landscape complexity) on bumblebees. I will go in-depth investigating diet, colony growth, reproduction and morphology and also add a historical aspect by investigating bumblebee-specimen collected during the last century. I hope my research will bring new light to the reasons behind bumblebee declines and provide a foundation for more efficient conservation measures.

See you in the corridors!

januari 9, 2017

Inger Ekström

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